How Kenya should engineer its future

President of the Institution of Engineers of Kenya Shammah Kiteme. [Courtesy]

In less than 40 years from today, Kenya will be 100 years old. The question is what sort of a country will we be on our 100th birthday? There is a lot to ponder about, but we must be clear that we could be at a better place than we are today. But we cannot sit and assume that things will work out.

We must actively shape the future that we want--and so engineer it. This means deliberate effort to design the future we and future generations would be proud of.

At independence, our founding fathers committed to fight disease, ignorance and poverty. The question is, 60 years’ post-independence, where are we on these? We have 83 per cent literacy levels in Kenya today.

Poverty rate is at 40 per cent and only 25 per cent of Kenyans have insurance cover. While we have over 9,000 healthcare facilities, over two thirds of money is paid to private healthcare facilities which is an indication of Kenyans trust in private healthcare providers as opposed to the public healthcare system.

Africa was left behind by the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th industrial revolutions. The same should not happen to the 5th industrial revolution.

A hungry population is also a sick population. We must cultivate all arable land. We should do that to ensure that we meet local demand for food and export the excess. It is embarrassing that we import rice, sugar, maize and other foodstuff. We must facilitate irrigated agriculture. This will be done through construction of dams and water pans. We should build local fertiliser plants. We must encourage local manufacturing for all that we need to turn around agriculture.

We must then address the need for roads and railways from and into every village. This will help evacuate produce from every corner of this country. A masterplan is required for all these infrastructures. We are a country of misplaced priorities and lost opportunities. We can change this in the next few years. We have had our false starts and misguided ventures. But life affords us a fresh start every new day.

A healthy population is a productive population. We must be deliberate in preventive rather than curative care. We must work from the village to ensure we have staffed community health centres and map the entire population from that point. We must plan for a mobile clinic serving every ward and avail basic health education and treatment at the village level. 

Our education system is very theoretical. We need to move from preparing our citizens for white collar jobs to training our minds to problem solving. The introduction of competency-based education is a great opportunity. 

China decided to train a large population in STEM from the '80s. As a result, the majority of its leaders, including the current President, a chemical engineer, have been engineers.  These leaders went ahead to craft a roadmap that has transformed the country in about 40 years.

We must focus, in every village, at producing a product that can be consumed locally and the excess exported. Industrialisation cannot remain a buzz word. It needs to become a deliberate initiative. We must support our citizens to produce something, everywhere and help them get a market for their produce.

We cannot fail to take action and imagine that by some miracle, our country will develop. With four years to 2030, we need to ask ourselves what has been achieved and what has not been achieved. Then launch Vision 2063 which will ensure that we rally the entire country into one unifying goal. Vision 2063 must replace Vision 2030.

Mr Kiteme a Civil Structural Engineer and the President of the Institution of Engineers of Kenya